Conversations

This concert is the result of an unique Australian project that brings the Conservatorium to the forefront of collaborative research in composing and performing music for Chinese and western instruments. Conservatorium staff Shan Deng (piano) and Maria Grenfell (composer) are the recipients of a University of Tasmania Institutional Research Grant. The aim was to create a set of pieces for piano and pipa (Chinese lute), based on traditional Chinese folk tunes that would be “re-composed” as new Australian pieces for this relatively unusual combination. Shan Deng was granted special permission to access the closed collection of Chinese folk songs at the Chinese Institute of Musicology in Beijing. Several thousand unpublished folk songs were collected in various forms in the 1950s, and these exist at the Institute as either tape recordings or transcriptions in Jianpu-notation (numbered musical notation). As a special privilege to be granted permission to this exclusive collection, unavailable to other Western musicians, Deng was given unlimited accssess because the Institute was established under the direction of her grandfather Li YuanQing. Born in China, Shan Deng is able to read Jianpu-notation and already has an understanding of Chinese folk music. In early January 2010 Shan Deng travelled to China and returned with a set of folk songs that she transcribed from original tape recording or Jianpu-notation into Western notation. There is a limited amount of newly-written music for Chinese and western instruments, particularly by non-Asian composers. This project seeks to investigate the combination of Asian and western instruments by incorporating folk tunes that were obtained by Shan Deng from the Institute of Chinese Musicology’s closed collection in Beijing. The folk tunes were transcribed into western musical notation, analysed and then a set of new Australian compositions for piano and pipa were written by Maria Grenfell. Before the process of composition began, Dr Deng Wei provided the necessary assistance and information on performance and stylistic techniques for pipa, as the composer was entirely unfamiliar with the instrument. Once the compositions were completed, Shan and Wei were able to work through each piece and suggest alterations that might be required, and discuss interpretive aspects of each piece with Maria. The collaborative aspect of the project has been highly innovative in Australian music and has also served to increase the pipa concert repertoire by pairing two culturally diverse instruments.